Cultural Diplomacy in Foreign Language Teaching: Some Evidences from the Teaching of Portuguese as a Foreign Language

Cultural Diplomacy in Foreign Language Teaching: Some Evidences from the Teaching of Portuguese as a Foreign Language

Moutinho, Ricardo
Carlos Paes de Almeida Filho, Jose

In an increasingly multi-territorialized and interdependent world, where technology plays an important role through many mass media services, people are getting more in touch with one another than ever before. This provides the possibility to overcome geographical boarders in order to build new relationships that foster mutual interests in economical and socio-cultural aspects from different countries. However, not only official diplomats are in charge of this exchange. As many language instructors are hired to teach in partner countries, they can all be considered independent, public or cultural diplomats who mediate interaction between cultures (or countries) through the teaching of a target language. Therefore, instructors will have to provide the students with information about socio-cultural aspects, rather than only linguistic ones, related to the people who speak the target language. This means that the instructor’s task is not teaching language itself, but teaching beyond language, incorporating topics related to the students’ interests. Besides that, as any good diplomat, instructors also have to know how to act in the culture they are in. For this reason, they must also be determined to learn about the other culture and language so that they can promote a fair positioning of the language sought. This study focuses on this topic illustrating real life situations experienced by how instructors of Portuguese as a Foreign Language (PFL) act as cultural diplomats of their language in an international setting. Considering that Portuguese has been growing in China due to bilateral agreements this country has with some Portuguese speaking nations (specially Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and Portugal), we intend to discuss which actions the PFL instructors (native and non-native ones) must perform to be considered cultural diplomats of this language in a setting like Macau, where Portuguese is starting to be seen as a global rather than a local language.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012

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